[John Vaudin]

Sadly, due to the Java RMI technology the server uses, the server needs to know the IP address that the clients will use to connect to it. That means there has to be one IP address that all clients can see. In your case you would need to arrange for clients inside the firewall to talk to CatDV Server via the publicly visible IP address, not to the internal IP address.

Depending on your requirements you might want to consider using the Web Client for users outside the firewall, and then have CatDV run on an internal IP address just for users behind the firewall.

[John Vaudin]

P.S. I will look at allowing you to enter two IP addresses in a future release…

[John Vaudin]

There is a known issue here if the Control Panel can’t ‘see’ the IP address that the clients need to use to connect to the server. You can get it to work by configuring the server to use the public IP address, but the Control won’t think the server is running, so will report that it can’t connect to it. However, this doesn’t actually stop the server working, and the client’s should be able to connect to it just fine. The only issue is you will forever have a red light against the server in the Control Panel. Not ideal I appreciate, but it should work.

[John Vaudin]

I can confirm this this feature will be present in the 6.9 release of the server/web client, that is currently in beta testing.

[John Vaudin]

If the server can’t find an appropriate proxy then the Web Client will not show the player control – it will just show the poster image.

If you double click on the CatDV Logo at the top left of the Web Client it will dump some diagnostic information including where it is looking for the proxies and if it can read the directory.

[John Vaudin]

You raise a number of issues:

1. Playback issues are almost always caused by missing web proxies or path mappings not set up to point to them. You will need to create appropriate proxy media, which means low-ish bandwidth and Fast Start (for QuickTime) or Streaming for H.264. You also need to set up path mappings in the Server Control Panel to point to them

2. Querying on user fields is not supported in 6.8 but will be supported in 6.9 which has just started beta testing.

3. The Web Client can use custom details panels, but it is an optional feature referred to as “Customisable UI”. Also check the settings in Web Client tab of the Server Config screen in the Control Panel to control where it picks up the panel definitions from.

[John Vaudin]

There is a known issue around the client sometimes not registering that there is a proxy there – even if the URL is correct. This is typically triggered if there is a bit of delay while serving up the file. There is a fix for this that will be in 10.0.5 which should be released any day now. Might be worth holding out for that.

This will sound a bit strange, but you can sometimes get it to work in these cases, by viewing the proxy in a browser first, and then click in the asset and seeing if it notices the proxy. I guess viewing it causes the server to load it into memory which makes the subsequent request quicker.

Anyway – as I say the proper fix should be here very soon.

In terms of large files, as long as they are Fast Start then it will simply stream the start of the file and start playing it almost immediately, while it loads the rest of the file in the background. You can also scrub to another point and the QuickTime Player is clever enough to send a special HTTP Range request to seek to the right part in the file (assuming the server supports that – which I would assume whatever S3 uses would).

[John Vaudin]

No – the HTTP proxies are streamed directly from the server. They are not stored locally.

[John Vaudin]

The settings Matt mentions probably aren’t relevant in this context. They are to get CatDV Server to serve the proxy files over HTTP. If I understand you correctly you are serving them directly from S3 – is that right?

Can you tell me (for one clip that has a proxy in S3):

1. Media path of clip (as displayed in the Summary tab in the client)
2. Complete URL the proxy file for that clip on S3
3. The mapping rule that maps from one to the other

Given that we should be able to sort it out.

[John Vaudin]

You can use HTTP proxies in the CatDV desktop client. You need to add a proxy mapping rule on the client of the form:

/path/to/media -> https://my_server/url_media_lives_at

CatDV treats these rules just like normal path rules.

So – if I have a media file with path:

/media/hi-res/foo.mov

that has a proxy at

/media/proxies/foo.mp4

and I publish the /media/proxies path to the url ‘webproxy’ so that the proxy file is available at:

https://my_server/webproxy/foo.mp4

then I need a rule like

/media/hi-res -> https://my_server/webproxy

Note I’m mapping from the hi-res to the proxy, the proxy just happens to live on HTTP.